St Patrick's Church, Meenaweal, Crolly, a small green tin church, was filled with mourners with standing room only as many others huddled underneath marquees outside the church.
This weekend such a moment occurred. I never knew I wanted to see Harry Styles channel Lord of the Dance Michael Flatley in a silk blouson shirt and headband and canter around a stage.
"I haven't heard him sing yet," Flannery confesses, in answer to the burning question, when we sit down after a rehearsal in Nuns Island theatre in Galway.
The Irish government will give 2,000 artists unrestricted weekly stipends in a program officials described as a "recognition, at government level, of the important role of the arts in Irish society." After a successful three-year pilot, the Irish government made its basic income program for artists permanent. Similar pilots have been launched here in the United States, but they're supported primarily by the nonprofit sector.
"My father spent most of his waking and sometimes sleeping hours in there...he'd ramble in and stumble out. I wrote this song after he passed at the fair young age of 62. The kind of tribute song he would have approved of. My father was a proud man. Loved his family and his drink in equal measure. My father showed his love shoulder to shoulder, not face to face."
